Rory King

DayZ Bliss

DayZ Bliss
—
September 2012

DayZ is a popular modification for ARMA2, it places players in the role of a survivor in a post-apocalyptic, zombie-infested and hyper-realistic world. Players must fight the environment, zombies and other players in order to survive. All servers are connected to a central hive in order to provide a persistent experience for players. For a host to gain access to this “public hive” they must agree to some archaic restraints on infrastructure which they own. DayZ Bliss is a “private hive”, it is a self-hosted clone of the public hive, offering significant improvements to speed, customisability and, perhaps most importantly, is completely open source and is maintained by the community.

My contributions to the Bliss project consisted mainly of collaborating on improvements to their MySQL database schema. This constituted a full redesign and normalisation of the schema, the net result was an impressive reduction in server resources and player load times. I also wrote some developer tools for converting ARMA2 map files to the Bliss vehicle spawn point schema, although this was never released to the public.

Unfortunately, due to a major refactoring in the DayZ codebase in early 2013, the project was abandoned by its core developers and is no longer actively maintained.